SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010
I’m honoured once again to be speaking at the Best Practices Conference, which is taking place in Washington D.C. August 24th thru 27th. The Best Practices Conference is easily the best non Microsoft SharePoint event, and the speaker line up is excellent. If you are implementing SharePoint 2010, you don’t want to miss this show. This year, I’m leading up the Keynote: What the Masters think About SharePoint 2010, which will feature five fellow MCMs all of whom do not work for Microsoft. I will also be presenting the following breakouts, all with updated new content specifically for...
I’m giving away a one year Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscription. It’s worth quite a lot of money, but more importantly you get all the software you could possibly want to help you build your solutions. The contest is very simple. Just suggest a topic for a future article here. The rules are: Open only to non Microsoft Employees and non MVPs You must post your suggestion here using a comment. No email, no twitter, no face book, no nothing apart from comments here. The...
It’s been a bit quiet here recently, one of the reasons for that is I recently attended the first rotation of the Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint 2010. A number of people have requested that I post my thoughts on this and address some common questions about the certification. Before I get started, I must include another Thrilleresque disclaimer. I am part of the team that produced the MCM for SharePoint 2010. I am an instructor and content owner for six modules. Therefore I have an obvious vested interest in the program. However, this doesn’t change the fact that...
This, the third part of the Rational Guide article on multi tenancy walks through the example scenario which future articles use to show how to build out the multi tenant capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010. I will also highlight the key features in action, providing an overview of what multi tenancy brings to a SharePoint 2010 deployment. If you haven’t checked out the previous parts, I strongly encourage you to review them. I won’t repeat information and I assume you have read the previous parts, which are: Feature and Capability Overview Planning...
In the first part of my Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 article, I walked through the problem space and discussed the features of SharePoint 2010 that enable multi tenant environments. This can be seen as the “overview” (or perhaps “marketing” :)). As promised this is part two, the idea of which is to walk through how to set it all up along with some general recommendations. Now, as much as I wanted to post this as a single article, it’s just too big. There’s too much to discuss and there’s way too much script. I’m not...
Since the release of SharePoint 2010, one of the most common questions I get is “what is the best way to get up and running to be able to play around”. Microsoft of course offer a pre-canned VM which is an excellent resource for partners for sales purposes. But if you are a little more technical, you probably want to set it up yourself. Here is THE GUIDE for doing this, hot off the press from the folks at Critical Path: ***NOW AVAILABLE*** Create your own SharePoint Server 2010 RTM Virtual Machine - The Complete Guide Enjoy!
This second article in my Rational Guide series focuses on the capabilities in SharePoint 2010 which enable the delivery of hosting environments. Hosting is finally a first class citizen in SharePoint 2010, however there isn’t a great deal of material out there on this subject. This article will:
walk through the problem space
discuss the features of SharePoint 2010 that enable multi-tenant environments
provide a step by step guide to setting it all up
give general recommendations for those looking to deliver hosting platforms...
PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 rocks. No, really it does. You hate it at first, but then it’s all pure goodness. But boy, does the UI SUCK! Crap for productivity, crap for demos, just about crap for anything other than lame jokes about old skool shell scripting.
Sure, there are funky PowerShell GUIs out there, but they appear to cost money. The good news is Windows ships with it’s own IDE. This thing is called an ISE – prey how much do marketing people get paid?
Anyway – that’s what I’ve been using for all my demos to show the PowerShell stuff that...
Yalls may be playing around with Service Application Federation with SharePoint 2010 with the shiny new SharePoint Server 2010 bits. This federation is also called publishing and consuming service applications, but as I’m spending a lot of my time of late in PowerPoint, I’m using the buzzword for the time being. However, with the RTM bits there is a fundamental missing piece that is not currently documented on Tech Net. Of course you need to exchange and install the necessary certificates as detailed here. However in order to make it work the consuming farm must have permissions to...
SharePoint 2010 includes a fundamental architectural change from the previous version with the introduction of “Service Applications”. This new architecture has extremely broad and deep consequences for SharePoint practitioners. Unfortunately Service Applications thus far have been poorly explained and documented, and already there are many myths surrounding them. This “In a Nutshell” article is an attempt to distil the core elements down to brass tacks. It is intended primarily for architects and administrators planning their farm topologies, but will also be useful for anyone working with SharePoint 2010. http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010sa2.aspx
I’ll be participating in a few SharePoint Community Events over the next few weeks, for those interested the details are below. Wednesday 28th April (5pm – 6pm GMT) Online SharePoint MVP Expert MSDN Chat This is a new idea, and will be interesting to see how it goes. The general idea is for you to fling your questions about SharePoint 2010 at the panel of SharePoint MVP “experts”. A free online event via MSDN. Wednesday 5th May (5.30pm till whenever) Microsoft, Waverly Gate Edinburgh SUGUK...
There's a ton of stuff out there on User Profile Sync in SharePoint Server 2010. Some of it’s good, some of it’s frankly terrible. TechNet has some of the best material, but unfortunately TechNet’s format restrictions are counter-intuitive. Therefore this article presents an end to end, “rational guide” to setting this up. There are a couple of contentious setup requirements in here. I may discuss those in more depth later. For now, the following steps are required. Don’t try and work around them, UPS will break. The following is the least privilege you can get away with. This...
For those that attended a couple of my presentations earlier in the week at the Evolution conference I hit a couple issues, both of which are pretty lame and embarrassing. At the time I promised to post an update here once I'd had the chance to look at the boxes again. FBA login issue. this was purely a problem between keyboard and the stage. I was entering the passwords: Password1 and password. The correct password for John Coltrane was P@ssword1 – due to the complexity requirements of the ASPNETDB. I don’t actually use FBA against ASPNETDB that...
Here are the slides from my presentations at the SharePoint 2010 Evolutions Conference this week in London. I will be updating this page as we get through each day of the show. Monday IT101: Overview of what’s new in SharePoint 2010 for IT Pros (with Neil Hodgkinson). DD105: Multi-Tenancy in SharePoint 2010. Tuesday DD108: Claims based Authentication in SharePoint 2010. IT109: Configuring Managed Metadata Service (with Steve Smith). DEV111: Multilingual solutions with SharePoint 2010. Wednesday IT112: SharePoint 2010 Mythbusters. IT114: Configuring and managing User Profile Synchronization. ...
Quite a long time ago there was a comedy to and fro regarding the non-ability of SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl (or index) Web Applications on non-default ports which had been configured to use Kerberos Authentication. The upshot was that you needed to have a non Kerberos site in the default zone for the purposes of crawling. The full details of this are posted over at TechNet: Configure Kerberos-authenticated sites for crawling. Now of course using non default ports is really rather silly, but it happens a lot. There was also some misinformation posted over on the To...
This is the first in a series of posts about using Kerberos with SharePoint 2010. This one is an easy introduction to using Kerberos for authentication in Classic Mode. My good buddy Ted Pattison likes to joke around with me that Kerberos is dead, thanks to the “new” world of claims based identity. But it is a joke! :) Kerberos is far from dead, and in many scenarios it is still the best choice for Authentication, if not Authorization within SharePoint 2010. For those of you who are fellow security geeks, you will know of course, that Kerberos is indeed...
Earlier this week I presented a session at the SharePoint User Group UK Manchester event. Shout out to Mark Stokes for organising yet another great SUGUK event. This session was an introduction/overview of IA for SharePoint, and also highlighted the key new features in this realm within SharePoint Server 2010. For those interested you can download the slide deck below. Information Architecture for SharePoint Server
Quite some time ago I posted coverage of the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key and how it impacts SharePoint. It’s amazing just how often this comes up on the Interwebz. Scarily the common advice given is to turn this feature off. And that’s bad advice. In my original post I detailed why. In a nutshell: OK in test/dev, NOT OK in Production. Yesterday my buddy Bob Fox posted a follow up, DisableLoopBackCheck? Let’s do it the right way. His post details how to configure a list of names which won’t be checked. This is all good, but what if you...
Over on the rather natty looking new blog from PFE extraordinaire Todd Carter, there are details of a serious issue with SharePoint that everyone should be familiar with. Check it out. Todd's Blog | SharePoint’s Sasquatch Memory Leak
I’m somewhat aggrieved this morning, as I found a new article from TechNet entitled “Using Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication”. Now while this article is not supposed to be the be all and end all it is very depressing that still now, in 2010, such inaccurate and in some cases 100% wrong information is being put out there by the vendor. This is especially true given the work I have done in this space over the last 18 months. So what’s wrong with it? Well one of the reasons people find this area difficult is nobody seems willing to...
As I’ve previously detailed there is a significant oddity with how SharePoint 2010 Beta creates Application Pools in IIS for the hosting of Service Applications and especially the two most important services in your farm, the STS and Topology. As mentioned these application pools are named with GUIDs.
Unfortunately when creating a Web Application, SharePoint 2010 uses the SharePoint only property Display Name for the STS application. The STS application is required as part of every SharePoint 2010 Web Application and lives at /_vti_bin/sts.
As the Web Application is being provisioned SharePoint uses the display name, SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool. This of course doesn’t exist...
We are pleased to announce a new release of the popular Application Pool Manager. This version (v3) has been produced to support SharePoint 2010. We don’t have much in the way of fancy new features in this release, but we do have some good ideas for a future release around April and are always keen on other ideas we could incorporate. The most important thing about this release is that it is targeted at SharePoint 2010 only. As such it only supports IIS7. This has allowed us to remove all of the legacy IIS6 code and the shims necessary...
Blimey! My recent post about worker processes generated a large number of follow up questions. Instead of answering all of these individually, this post will cover the details and perhaps be useful as a reference in the future. Before I get started there is one thing which perhaps is obvious, but needs to be made clear: SharePoint 2010 is a beta release. It is always possible that things change come the final RTM release. That’s the point of a beta really!:) I am going to assume the same setup characteristics from the example in the previous post. ...
I’m honoured to be one of the speakers at the upcoming SharePoint Connections 2010 event in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on the 18th and 19th January. It promises to be a great show with lots of great 2010 content and speakers. The general goal of the event is to deliver highlights from the SharePoint Conference earlier this year in Las Vegas to the European audience as well as offering significant networking opportunities. Its all going down at the RAI conference centre just outside Amsterdam city. The RAI isn’t a casino, but it is an excellent conference facility! I will presenting...
Recently a number of people have asked about the number of worker processes which are alive on a new install of SharePoint Server 2010 and the associated other processes which amongst other things increase the resource requirements (primarily RAM) for running SharePoint 2010 over SharePoint 2007. This post will explain the core changes here and what you can expect to see following the installation and farm configuration. As with SharePoint 2007, or any other .NET based web application for that matter, your implementation specifics will determine the number of and isolation and security characteristics of the processes running including...